The Lion Gate
of Mycenae

The Lion Gate
of Mycenae was the entrance to the city. Atop the gate, two lions rampant
are carved in stone relief. Similar bas-reliefs of two lions rampant facing
each other are found in a number of places in Phrygia in Asia Minor.1

The
Lion Gate of Mycenae

Arslantas,
Rock-cut Phrygian tomb

The resemblance
in idea is complete, wrote W. M. Ramsay in 1888.2 He considered the scheme so peculiarly characteristic
of Phrygia, that we can hardly admit it to have been borrowed from any
other country. He found himself driven to the conclusion that
the Mycenaean artists either are Phrygians or learned the idea from the
Phrygians.3 It is not allowable to separate them [the Phrygian
and Mycenaean monuments] in time by several centuries.4

The Phrygian
monuments, in Ramsays view, belong to the ninth and eighth
centuries.5

. . . The end
of the Phrygian kingdom is a fixed date, about 675 B.C.6 when the invasion of Asia Minor by the Cimmerians put an
end to the Phrygian culture and art. Ramsay went on:

I do not think
it is allowable to place the Mycenaean gateway earlier than the ninth,
and it is more likely to belong to the eighth century.

The view
to which I find myself forced is as follows. There was in the eighth
century lively intercourse between Argos and Asia Minor: in this intercourse
the Argives learned . . . to fortify their city in the Phrygian style
with lions over the gate. Historically there is certainly good reason
to assign at least part of the fortifications of Mycenae to the time
when the Argive kings [the tyrants of the eighth century] were the greatest
power in Greece [here follow the names of several authorities among
the historians who hold the same view].8

On the other
hand, the almost universal opinion of archaeologists rejects this hypothesis.
. . .

Oriental influences
found in the remains of Mycenae are precisely what we should expect
in a kingdom like the Argos of the eighth century, when this kingdom
had intercourse with Asia Minor, Phoenicia and Egypt. I wish however
to express no opinion here about the date of the Mycenaean tombs and about
Mycenaean pottery, but only to argue that the fortifications of the Lion
Gate belong to the period 800-700 B.C.9

I quote this
opinion of Ramsay with the special intention of showing how this viewpoint
was invalidated.

The Egyptologist
Flinders Petrie made the following reply:

[A] matter
which demands notice is Professor Ramsays conclusion that the lion
gateway is of as late a date as the eighth century B.C. This results from
assuming it to be derived from Phrygian lion groups, on the ground of
not knowing of any other prototype. As however we now have a wooden lion,
in exactly the same attitude, dated to 1450 in Egypt . . . it seems that
the Phrygian designs are not the only source of this motive for Mykenae.10

In Egypt of
the latter part of the Eighteenth Dynasty a single instance of a rampant
lion (not two rampant lions facing each other as at Mycenae and in Phrygia)
made Petrie claim Egypt as a possible place of origin of this image rather
than Phrygia. He had discovered heaps of Mycenaean ware in Egypt of the
time of Akhnaton. He could not but conclude that these heaps coming from
Mycenae must be dated to the fourteenth century.11

Equally impressive
was the discovery at Mycenae of a number of objects of Eighteenth-Dynasty
date, such as objects bearing the cartouches of Amenhotep II, Amenhotep
III, and Queen Tiy.12

Therefore Petrie
decidedly opposed Ramsay in his estimate of eighth century for the Lion
Gate and the fortification wall of Mycenae.13

Here is a case
where evidence from Anatolia pointed to the eighth century;14 but the Egyptologist demanded of the classical scholar
that he disregard this evidence in favor of the time scale of Egypt.

The debate between
Ramsay and Petrie took place before Evans archaeological work on
Crete; there rampant lions were found engraved on Late Minoan gems,15 conveying the idea that Mycenae must have borrowed the
image from there, from a period well preceding the Phrygian models.16 Yet one should not lose sight of the fact that Cretes
chronology was also built upon relations with Egypt. In the section The
Scandal of Enkomi we shall read how Evans objected to the chronological
implications of Cypriote archaeology by stressing relations between the
Egyptian and the Minoan (Cretan) chronologies on the one hand, and Minoan
and Cypriote on the other. In Ages in Chaos it was shown in great
detail why the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt must be placed in
the latter part of the ninth century. Thus even if Crete was the original
source of the motif, Mycenae and Phrygia both deriving it thence, the
dependence of Cretan chronology on that of Egypt constitutes the crux
of the problem.17

Let us keep
in mind that in the 1880s and 1890s classical scholars of the stature
of W. M. Ramsay (1851-1939) questioned the inclusion of the Dark Ages
of several hundred years duration between the Mycenaean past and
the Ionic age in Greece. And let us not overlook what was the supposedly
crushing argument for wedging more than half a millennium into the history
of ancient Greece.

References

Cf.
especially the relief on the Lion Tomb at Arslan Tash
near Afyonkarahisar (fig.)

Ramsay,
A Study of Phrygian Art, pp. 369-370. [Earlier
representations of two rampant lions facing each other are known
from Crete; however, it is for the carving technique on stone on
a monumental scale that Mycenae seems to be indebted to Phrygia.
For a link to Assyria, see L. M. Greenberg, The Lion Gate
at Mycenae, Pensée IVR III, p. 26.]

Ibid.,
p. 70.

[Emilie
Haspels in Highlands of Phrygia (Princeton, 1971) dates the
Phrygian reliefs at Arslan Tash to the last third of the eighth
century B.C., the period of the Phrygian City of Gordion
(vol. I, p. 135; cf. vol. II, pl. 131-32). E. Akurgal, however,
puts the same reliefs in the early sixth century, deriving them
from Ionian, and ultimately Egyptian modelsDie Kust Anatoliens
von Homer bis Alexander (Berlin, 1961) pp. 86-90, 95. EMS ].

Sir
W. M. Flinders Petrie, Notes on the Antiquities of Mykenae,
Journal of Hellenic Studies XII (1891), pp. 202-03. [Petrie
also attempted to fix the dates of many of the finds from the Mycenaean
tombs by comparing them with objects from Egypt whose antiquity
he considered to be well-established.]

Boardman
notes that monumental sculpture of this kind is unknown in Greece
from the time the Lion Gate of Mycenae was built until the eighth
century: More than five hundred years were to pass before
Greek sculptors could [again] command an idiom that would satisfy
these aspirations in sculpture and architecture. Greek
Art (New York, 1964), p. 22. [A few other
500-year enigmas appear at Mycenae. See below, Supplement, Applying
the Revised Chronology, by Edwin Schorr.]

[In
The Sea People Sandars points out the stylistic similarity
between the Lion Gate of Mycenae and the Lion Gate of Boghazkoi.
EMS]

[Some
of these gems were known even before Evans digssee for
instance the intaglio in G. Perrot and C. Chipiez, History of
Art in Primitive Greece II (London, 1894), pp. 214 and 246,
depicting two rampant lions facing each other in a way similar to
that on the Lion Gate. Cf. also the gems shown in Corpus der
minoischen und mykenischen Siegel, ed. F. Matz and H. Bisantz
(Berlin, 1964) nos. 46, 144, 145, 172.]

[N.
Platon, (Cretan-Mycenaean Art, Encyclopaedia of World
Art IV [New York, 1958], p. 109) thought that the technique
of the execution [of the Lion Gate] is clearly inspired by Cretan
sculpture. But the Cretan sculptures, unlike those in Phrygia,
are miniatures, and Platon needs to assume the effective translation
of a miniature theme into a major sculptural creation (R.
Higgins, Minoan-Mycenaean Art [New York, 1967], p. 92). Sandars
in The Sea Peoples points out the similarity of the monumental
carving style of the Lion Gate of Boghazkoi in central Anatolia
to the Lion Gate of Mycenae.]

[The
discovery of Late Helladic IIIB pottery in strata excavated underneath
the gate is used to establish the date of its construction.]
But this pottery, too, is dated on the basis of relations with Egypt.